We know comparatively so little about hereditary transmission, that to allege of the fixed “law,” or laws thereof, is to part company with the possibilities.
Degree by degree, the finite mind of man edges closer to that which but ten decades ago was by common consent relegated to the domain of the infinite; as for examples, telegraphy, telephony, and the wireless. The wireless, mark you, the metallic language of which depends primarily upon synchronous vibrations produced by sound waves.
That’s striking so close to telepathy as to make rational conception of pre-natal influence relatively simple reasoning. Also, it causes one to wonder if it be not a part of the Great Scheme of the all-knowing Father to unfold the finite mind of man measurably to conception of the infinite?
Be all as it may, present social conditions in America offer many visible signs of far-removed atavistic pressure upon polyglot Americans in the making; signs directly applicable to thousands of alien predal felons in our midst, whom, with such signs, the psycho-analyst must read. Of those signs are the singular predilection of the Sicilian-Italian criminal for criminousness by group expression, initiating with the “Mafiauso,” headquarters at Palermo, Sicily; and the instinctive predisposition of his blood brothers of the “Camorra,” across the Strait of Messena, headquarters at Naples, to combine against the established social order and tear things.
Hence, largely it is, that human life in America is at the moment held at a price less than the primitive savage placed upon it. Spurious leaders of athletics of old Rome got behind that bad business with the bone-breaking gladiator; and spurious leaders of athletics are to-day pressing in America for reversion to the murderous sporting type of Nero’s time, through establishing the blood-spilling pug-ugly, and heroizing the low-down parasital “sport.”
Get that, to its ramifications, such as that on the one hand the average annual salary of ministers of the Methodist faith has just been raised approximately from 800 to 1100 dollars; and on the other hand, that a won’t-work, fistic brute demands and commands $300,000, “win or lose,” for a few minutes at cutting, slugging and punching recognition out of the countenance of another parasital “pug.” This, while public school teachers have to press, and press for a living wage, given grudgingly.
Get just that much of anti-social play and pressure, then wonder not that the sporting-grooved predal felon spurns actual work, and that college authorities have to put hopples on thousands of sport-soaked, bucking young bronchos, in order to align them for a smattering of cheap culture.
As if all that were not enough, would-be bellwethers of reform can not rest until they have well-nigh ruined régimes of reform through supercharging them with so-called “sporting features.”
Right here is the chance for the wholly honest, wholly earnest psycho-analyst to score. Better than he, none should know that legitimate sport outraged is commonly one of the cardinal causes for the confirmed criminal; and that to further inoculate with the sporting “bug” a lad already ridden by the vicious by-products of sport, is directly to furnish him with formula for further perversion of a fundamentally good instinct. He also knows that perversion of the sporting instinct frequently ends with the Wassermann test, and the polluted victim who is a menace to the public health.
Prisoner or freeman, rational exercise in the free air he should have; but why, after nearly two-thousand years of kneeling at Christian altars, should man hold up such as the “two-fisted,” cruel, degenerate, human battering ram, as a criterion for his upcoming kiddies to ape? And if he will have it so, why babble about “disarmament” and “waves” of crime?